Monthly Archives: January 2014

“It’s fun to Dream”: Looking back at Aaron McGruder’s Return of the King episode of The Boondocks

Note: The below essay is part of a larger piece that I wrote in 2009 after studying the major works written by MLK and about MLK. I have made a few grammatical edits, but this shows where my thinking was then.

What if MLK did not die on April 4, 1968, but instead went into a deep coma for 32 years. Imagine that he came out of his coma in the year 2000 to a new world that shocks him and causes him to question what he fought for during the height of the civil rights movement.

Satirist Aaron McGruder cinematized this idea in 2006 in the “Return of The King” episode of The Boondocks.McGruder magnificently satirized the social, political, and economic changes that occurred in the 32 years while King was out. King’s legacy was turned into a commodity, the culture became more narcissistic and hedonistic, streets which bared his name were ironically violent, black people became apathetic, and people forgot what he actually stood for.

In the episode, King agreed to a movie deal, which came to be directed by Oliver Stone and featured Cuba Gooding, Jr. as King. The movie came out a week after the attacks of September 11. In an interview on Politically Incorrecthe suggested that Americans “turn the other cheek,” in response to the terror attacks. Immediately his new rise in popularity plummeted, and he was called a depicted as an unpatriotic traitor. King’s heart was broken, but Huey, the radical ten year old protagonist of the show, convinced King to start a new political movement centered on King’s ideas on civil and human rights. Their attempts to mobilize people through popular media failed because nobody was interested in hearing the truths to which he spoke.

King decided to hire an urban promotions company which advertised the political party’s inaugural meeting. Unfortunately, the inaugural meeting was advertised as a party/awards show event. People showed up to the political party meeting with partying on their mind instead of activism. All sorts of character were at the party, including celebrities and televangelists. It was difficult for King and Huey to get into the party because their name was not on the list, so they bribed the bouncer to get in. Once in, King was shocked by the behavior of the crowd –profane, hedonistic, and apathetic. King made his way through the crowd, finally getting the mic to announce the goals of his political party, but no one listened to his pleasant attempts for order so that he could speak. Out of frustration, King shouted out “WILL YOU IGNORANT NIGGAS PLEASE SHUT THE HELL UP?!” This caused the audience to come to an abrupt silence which allowed him to go into a diatribe about what he had witnessed in his time back from coma.He lamented, “Is this it? Thisis what I got all those ass-whoopings for?” King’s speech to the crowd was loaded with critiques of black popular culture which he understood as the source of regression for black politics.

King concluded his speech saying, “I’ve seen what’s around the corner, I’ve seen what’s over the horizon, and I promise you, you niggas have nothing to celebrate! And no, I won’t get there with you. I’m going to Canada.” King thanked Huey, advising him to keep pushing. King’s speechignited a fire among black people,which increased black political activity like never before.. The episode concluded with a mob of enraged, young black men and women screaming at the gates of the White House, cursing an unnamed presidential administration. Several news channels reported that all black members of the NBA decided to sit out their season until troops were withdrawn from Iraq, that drop-out rates among African-American youths had suddenly plummeted, and that Robert L. Johnson (foundr of BET) had issued a public apology for his network’s deployment of “negative” images of black life.Finally, the front page of a newspaper from 2020 show edrevealing that King had died in Vancouver at 9; it alsoreported that Oprah Winfrey had become the POTUS.

The episode concluded withthis message, “It’s fun to dream.”

Though this cartoon represented an imaginary scenario, what McGruder comically portrayed has happened and will continue to happen if we don’t truly embrace all of the realities and messages of King.

MLK stands as one of the greatest American heroes in the history of America. He understood the beauty of America and embraced its noble ideas of freedom. So much so, that he worked his entire life to make sure that the American Dream was accessible to all of its citizens. His life alone, without the aid of any other person or institution, made him an American hero. But all sorts of forces have worked to romanticize and sanitize him. In doing so, he remains only a great man who spoke great words on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, not a man who challenged America and the world to live in a World House by ending racism, militarism, and poverty. By limiting King to a dream spoke in 1963 and a martyr who died in 1968, we also ensure that the demands that he and other leaders called for never come to life because not many know or want to know the King that began to consider “Why America May Go To Hell.”

He wanted America to live to the full capacity of her ideas, and he would have us do the same. Michael Eric Dyson argued that “We can claim his brand of heroism by fully and honestly embracing the cantankerous differences that unite us in our constant pilgrimage to America: With King as a guide, we can discover America again, and set off to conquer nothing less than the ignorance and fear that keep us from and not with each other.”

Although I am not a black woman, the show resonates with me because I know (not through embodiment) the black woman that it is attempting to represent—I’ve loved her, I’ve hurt her (tried not to), she is a few of my homegirls, she is a family member, she is “beautifully flawed.” But let me keep it all the way real, I also like Being Mary Jane because it provides me erotic pleasure. Not only because of its direct depictions of eroticism, but also because as much as I respect women and eschew sexism, umm, I am a sex positive feminist who still sexually desires and receives pleasure from viewing black women’s bodies. Therefore, on the same day you might hear me say “Dawg, did you see that ass, she fina’ than a mother effer” and critique the lyric that suggests that its okay for me to control that ass or be violent towards it.

After watching the most recent episode I could not sleep because I had a flood of thoughts and emotions running through my brain.These racing thoughts eventually slowed down for me to hear, “Being Mary Jane has some real religious aspects to it that I can get down with and that I identify with.” Not religious in the sense of worshiping a deity, practicing rituals, or abiding by a particular dogma, but religious in the way that Anthony Pinn defines religion, “the struggle to obtain meaning through a process of ‘becoming’”.Pinn notes:

Religion’s basic structure, embedded in history, is a general quest for complex subjectivity in the face of the terror and dread associated with life within a historical context marked by dehumanization, objectification, abuse, intolerance, and captured most forcefully in the sign/symbol of the “ghetto.” The quest for complex subjectivity that is the elemental nature of religion involves a desired movement from life as corporeal object controlled by oppressive and essentializing forces, to a life as a complex conveyer of cultural meaning with a detailed and creative identity. This subjectivity is complex, holding in tension many spaces of identification by making them vibrant components of a larger tangled reality. (Pinn, Noise and Spirit: The Religious and Spiritual Sensibilities of Rap Music)

From the jump, the title says it all—Being Mary Jane—that is this quest to exist as Mary Jane in the face of everything that attempts to destroy Mary Jane, even herself. So what we see throughout each episode is Mary Jane struggle to be her true self or be a better self in spite of her existential realities—those things that make her question the what, why, how, when, and where of her life—that attempt to dehumanize her or make her less worthy. What are these things? One could call them the interlocking matrices of things that can work together to oppress her or encage her—being woman, being a black woman, being a single never black woman, being a single never married black woman over the age of 30 with no kids, being a single never married black woman over the age of 30 with no kids who has a successful career and supports herself, being a single never been married black woman over the age of 30 with no kids who has a successful career and supports herself and wants to be married, being a single never been married black woman over the age of 30 with no kids who has a successful career and supports herself and wants to be married but still pursues sexual pleasure and the temporality of men who will never marry her, and being all of this and more in a “white man’s world.” Alll of these realities have political, spiritual, and emotional consequences that can prevent Mary Jane from being who it is that she wants to be and who it is God made her to be.

(See: Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Lewis Gordon’s Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy for more info on existentialism cause)

Next, each episode begins with a sermonic theme/epigraph/opening credit that guides the episode and beckons the viewer to wonder, “where is this episode going,” and “what will the protagonist struggle with.” What’s beautiful about these attention-getting devices is that they resonate with the struggles that we have in becoming human. We follow along for the 30-40 minutes, living vicariously through Mary Jane, watching to see how she navigates through her struggles to see if it can help us with ours.

Lastly, each episode is filled with scripture in the form of the affirmations, biblical verses, or inspirational quotes that Mary Jane keeps around her various spaces. These post-it affirmations are reminders to Mary Jane of who she is or who she desires to be.

This resonates with me so much because I had to do this for much of my late twenties. In order for me to become my true self, my better self, and the self that I felt God wanted me to be I had to change the way that I thought about myself, God, and life in general. This changing happened in many ways, but one important factor in that process was creating a book of Affirmations and Autosuggestions.In it I had lists of autosuggestions that defined me. One section was titled “Who am I” and it contained “I am Statements”about specific areas of my life—me the individual, me the husband, me the professional, and me as a financial steward. Some of the statements were things that I already embodied, and others were things that I wanted to embody. Another section was titled “What I love about myself.” This was the most difficult section to write because when I began to process, I found that I hated myself.Many of the statements were inverses of the negative thoughts I held about myself or that others directed towards me. For example, I had a statement that read, “I love that I am a chocolate brother” because I had hated my dark skin for a long time and I had to come to embrace it. Another statement read, “I love that I have struggled and overcome,” because I wanted to embrace the struggle, accept it, and get over it.

I also created a digital visualization board to serve as a constant reminder of what I want my life to look like.

I had to do all of this to Be Maco L. Faniel, cause I was being somebody else, because my livebody after 18 in this world was a threat to many, and because I was tryingto live based on others desires of me. Like Mary Jane and you, I am still struggling to become.

That is why I can’t get down with the simple critiques of the Being Mary Jane or Scandal that attempt to dismiss the artistry, dismiss the narrative of black women living those realities, or relegate the shows as cinematography that reinforces that black women are effed up jezebels that can’t find a “good” black man. I read them as fictional representations of real life, and real black life for some real black people. In real life we experience stuff that “makes it hard to smile” but we try to keep our sense of humor and “smile through all [the] bullshit.” And smiling through the bullshit is part of the making meaning of who we are and how we want to exist in this world.

Regardless of our personal qualms or what we would like to see from black shows, Mary Jane is striving to be Mary Jane, just like we are all striving to become. And that, to me, is that “old time religion” because it shows wretched characters striving to live up to their human and divine potential.And as Russell Simmons suggested:

Locations within the secular world must also be examined for disclosures of the religious if we are to be able to understand what people are really thinking religiously and how those thoughts influence their behavior in the real world. (quoted in Noise and Spirit: The Religious and Spiritual Sensibilities of Rap Music by Anthony Pinn.)

Today is the birthday of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK). If not assassinated on April 4, 1968 he would be 85.

Since 2009, I’ve written a piece, either on my blog or for a publication, about MLK and his legacy. I’d planned to do the same this year. I thought about writing a piece connecting Houston, Stevie Wonder, Gil Scott Heron, and the petitioning to make his b-day a national holiday. Then earlier this week, I thought about writing a piece on the irony of the critiques from the King heirs and others towards the young people who are using his image to promote their parties. Irony because I would argue that the history of King’s legacy is a history of appropriating his life and activism to fit our own corporate, political, and personal needs, but little of living his type of activism or his call for a World House (See his last text Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community (1967).

I am still grappling with each panelist’s theoretical perspective on whether or not WorldStarHipHop reifies black stereotypes and or serves as a modern“Battle Royal” (See Chapter 1 of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison), but I was more taken aback by the display of sexism from two of the male panelists.I call it sexism because I saw them downplay the theoretical and personal perspectives of Amanda and Dr. Cooper, dismiss Dr. Cooper as an “angry black woman,” and refuse to stand up for black women—all ways in which we men folk attempt to dominate, control, and silence women. (Watch the segment yourself and make your own conclusion)

Why sexism? Because just like racism, the attempt to dismiss a woman’s lived experience with violence and oppression or her theoretical perspective on it is an act of control and violence in itself. I saw this in the segment and the subsequent twitter conversation.When men try to silence a woman or tell a woman to calm down when she gets angry that is operating out of sexism because its an attempt to control how she responds and its an attempt to silence her (particularly if her voice goes above a sweet and passive tone). Lastly, when black men can call out violence against our people, but refuse to talk about the ways in which violence affects men and women differently, that is sexism.

I guess I am disturbed because as one who tries to live out the gospel of MLK, I understand that his oft opinioned assertion—“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”—goes beyond racial justice, but also applies to justice for women and men, GLBTQI identified persons, disabled persons, religious and non-religious persons, and the haves and the have nots.

But even King, the messianic figure that we have made him to be, operated out of sexism in his personal life through womanizing, blaming a woman for her husband’s cheating, and muting the voice of women in the movement.

I am a black man who checks for the “f” word and its politics, not because its convenient for me to do so at this point in my life or because it will offer me some type of sexual pleasure, but because the more that I come to understand and critique systems of power I must make sure that I am not reinforcing those systems (white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism) by excluding women, seeking to overpower them, seeking to control them, or silence them. I can’t critique the possessive investment in whiteness and not critique the possessive investment in patriarchy. It is possible for me to stand up against injustices directed towards the bodies of black men, and also do the same for black women, its not either or for me, its both.Therefore, I believe that it is possible for black women and black men to critique WorldStarHipHop for the ways in which it might reinforce or spectacularize violence against black bodies-male and female—while respecting the different ways that each racialized gender experiences violence.

So, while I am in the midst of investigating black masculinity and black male sexuality for a larger project on mass incarceration, in my free time I also try to understand feminist theory, particularly black feminist politics because it is not only useful for historicizing black life in the late 20thcentury, but also important for me to live a life of love (agape, eros, phillia, storge)and justice.

I don’t want to ever become well adjusted to the bullshit of patriarchy; hence, I am proud to be maladjusted. Not only do I hate patriarchy used by men, but I also hate when it is used by women to make claims that a man is not a real man if he does not live up to the norms of patriarchy.I don’t claimtoget it right all the time, I am fallible and I’m work in progress, but I know sexism when I see it.

I guess I am even more sensitive to this because I had a mother who tried to whip (read: beat) the “bad nigger” and aggression out of me. She raised me to not be like my daddy, which was later extended to don’t be like any dude that she knew or that I knew. While I have real issues with that mode of parenting, I understand the contexts that made her want to parent in such a way why she and I work out the rest in therapy.She raised me with a high respect for women. It was hard for me to respect her romantic partners, because despite her issues with men and her failures, I saw the dude’s issues with power—the way they acted towards my mother when they felt powerless.

As I watched her relationship conflicts I promised myself that I would never handle conflict in the way that I saw her and dude(s) do so. But then I grew up and began to have my own relationship problems rooted in my unchecked mama issues and unchecked power issues I found myself responding in similar ways when faced with powerlessness. Although I did not hit, my arguing was violent and my posture towards conflict with my woman was“I wish you would just shut the fuck up cause what you are saying don’t matter because you don’t matter beyond my pleasure.” At the time I did not know that I was operating out of patriarchy.I wasn’t trying to love, I wanted to be loved in a way that my mother did not and I wanted to dominate. Through some good ass therapy (marriage and personal), great mentors, and learning more about love and justice I’ve come to live a different way and love in a healthy way.

I had an aunt who defied every attempt from a man to have power over her. She eschewed marriage because she did not want a man telling her what to do. I saw her and two other aunts raise my cousins with little to no help from men. She was strong. She did not take any shit. She questioned patriarchy, not because she had an academic understanding of it, but because she saw the ways in which her mother and other women were victimized by it. I watched, listened, and took notes.

I also have some great mentors who eschew sexism in their personal lives (as husbands and fathers) and in their professional and political lives.

I grew up in a faith community that is about love and social justice, more than paying lip service to the ideas, but actually living them out in the hiring, preaching, worshipping, and service to the “least of these.” I grew up with two women pastors, one my youth pastor the other a co-pastor with equal duties and responsibilities as her male counterpart.

For these and other reasons I try to model love and respect for black women and advocate for their right to not only be heard, but to exist on their own terms and do with their bodies what they want to do.But my feminism goes further than that, I try my best to stand up for black women and stand up against the sexism and violence directed towards them, not only because so many have stood up for me and black men in general, but because its just right.

We don’t lose anything by acknowledging that black women got it bad out here, by standing up for black women, by loving black women without seeking to dominate them, by allowing them to do what they want to do with their hair and bodies, etc. Whatever personal issues that we have with women or with our own sense of powerlessness as a result of not living up to masculinity as defined by patriarchy, needs to be checked and healed (maybe through some counseling) because we are in this together trying to live black in this “white man’s world” and dismantle it at the same time.

For ten long years I lived my life as a recluse. I was an introverted and eccentric young Black professor. I was very much Like Sean Connery who portrayed an iconic yet inaccessible novelist, William Forrester, in the 2000 film, Finding Forrester. A film about two writers, one Black and one…